Monthly Archives: January 2009

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BARACK Obama is facing escalating death threats from white supremacists, according to senior law enforcement officers, prompting severe security restrictions in Washington DC.

The inauguration of the first black US president increases the danger, “particularly stemming from individuals on the extremist fringe of the white supremacist movement”, says an intelligence assessment by the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI.

CNN reported that interest in racist ideology was so high right after the November 4 election that computer servers for two white supremacist websites crashed.

I’ve mulled this issue on and off. We’ve clearly made incredible gains as a society on the racial front; indeed, we as a nation have been better than other societies at working at getting better. That’s why many conservatives argue passionately that it’s high time for everyone to stop claiming that racism is still a problem in America.

But this article reminds us that we still have a ways to go, doesn’t it? In a funny way, many Americans and many conservative Muslims overseas sound similar — “Look, don’t claim that the actions of a few nutcases taint the rest of us.” Maybe, but that still means that both Americans and overseas Muslims have some work to do to take on the nutcases. A healthy society must always take responsibility for its extremes, rather than than getting defensive at a public relations level.

John says Wall Street is dropping under Obama because it’s skeptical of bailouts.

But wasn’t it Paulson, the patron saint of Wall Street, who pushed for the massive $700B bailout? And aren’t most Wall Street people insisting that they’re too big too fail? I can’t find an example of Wall Street saying that government should stay out. John, the bailouts have happened because Wall Street begged for them, so that‘s why it’s Wall Street’s fault, not Obama’s fault. Did AIG say, “No, no, please don’t give us money?” Did other Wall Street firms say that is set a bad precedent? Not that I’m aware of.

I just got off the line with my financial advisor, who felt that the government did what it needed to do to prevent a complete Wall Street crash and new Depresssion. Maybe that’s a real positive, I don’t know. I actually am leery of the bailouts, myself. Still, your comment seems like a cynical shot at Obama, given how the free-market minds of Wall Street (and their Bush administration supporters) have been demanding our money.

I have thought of myself as more libertarian than liberal, John. But the era of government bailouts requested by industry and the era of foreign state-driven wealth funds that fund U.S. industry and government, mean that the line separating government and industry have been blurred.

I’ll confess my biases here: If John McCain or Mitt Romney were inaugurated yesterday, accompanied by a 300 point drop in the Dow, I’d have snorted about how the markets have no faith in the new prez.

Instead, the Dow plummeted after Obama delivered a stirring message of renewal to a citizenry that is very optimistic about him, according to the polls — so I’m a bit testy about how these Wall Street wimps greeted that message of renewal with another sell-off. Have they no ability to stop panicking at last? How much more rescue money, or Prozac, or both, do we need to stuff down their throat before they stop running in circles and screaming?

Well, the market never seems to make much sense, as can be seen by how Apple shares rose today even though the SEC is now poking its nose into its tent.

But after 9/11, it was seen as an act of patriotism for everyone, conservative or liberal, to avoid a rush to the exits once Wall Street re-opened. At some point, isn’t there a need to bring that approach back, even just on inauguration day?

To me, the ongoing bleeding, so “confidence-related,” is a reminder that too many investors are still driven by short-term speculative greed and not by the concept of prudent investment that is supposed to drive our society.

” ….a man whose father less than 60 years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.” President Barack Obama’s line in his inaugural speech was short, pointed and it passed too fast. But the sentiment and the message behind it were monumental. It was not solely a mild reminder that a half century ago a poor, hard core segregated and racially isolated, Washington D.C., mocked the nation’s flowery claim to be the fount of democracy. Nor did Obama make the point to show just how far the nation has come to put him in the White House.
It was a painful reminder that segregation is still a fresh memory. Here’s how fresh that memory is. A bare ten years before Obama was born, the ailing President of the National Association of Colored Women, Mary Church Terrell led a parade of pickets in front of several downtown Washington D.C. restaurants. Terrell demanded that the restaurants serve blacks. Terrell was hardly the first to pound on the Washington restaurant owners to drop the color barrier. The fight against the segregated restaurants had been going on for years. A federal district court finally struck down the restaurant ban in June, 1953.
The restaurant battle had much greater meaning for blacks and touched a much deeper primal anger than the other segregation fights. As rotten as the Jim Crow housing, schools, and hospitals that blacks were forced to attend, live in and get sick in, they had access to them. The restaurants were another matter. They were totally closed to blacks and this was the ultimate insult.

Blacks repeatedly hit a granite wall of resistance to opening them up. The greatest resistance of all came not just from restaurant owners but from the same Congress that Obama departed from. In the decade before the court ruling Congress could have easily passed legislation banning discrimination in public accommodations. It refused. The NAACP repeatedly demanded the ban. But Congress dominated by Southern Democrats and Northern Republican conservatives took the cue from the pithy remark by a former congressman in the 1930s who assured that Congress did not have to pass any law exempting restaurants from observing the segregation laws in force in the Capitol.
Things stayed that way until the court ruling in the 1950s. But the court ruling didn’t totally mark a racial sea change in the Capitol. Schools, top city government jobs, hospitals, and housing were still segregated by law or practice. Even as the barriers of segregation fell in D.C. the 1960s, schools and housing stayed just as black, poor, and segregated as decades earlier. The private school that Obama’s daughters now attend would have been slammed shut to them a few decades ago.

Obama made the Jim Crow restaurant reference in part to make the point that there has been undeniable racial progress and not just with his election. Washington D.C. is now a black run, black administered city. The suburbs surrounding the Capitol are loaded with high income black executives, white collar professionals, and businesspersons. Princes George, County is year in and year out ranked as the richest and most prestigious areas in the nation for blacks. But Washington D.C. is still a racial schizoid city. Poor blacks live in the same racial isolation that their grandparents, even their parents lived in.
While Congress has loosened the reins of control on D.C. during the past decade, it has also beaten back moves for full home rule. It was no accident that many of the black viewers that watched the inaugural speech at the gathering I attended gave head shakes and knowing nods at Obama’s mention that his father (and he) couldn’t have gotten past the doors at the Capitol’s Jim Crow restaurants. Segregation was not just a faint memory of a distant and by gone past to many of them. It was a painful, living experience that can’t or shouldn’t be forgotten. Thankfully, Obama made sure of that.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His forthcoming book is How Obama Won (Middle Passage Press, January 2009).

What was up with that tepid poem that followed Obama’s inaugural speech? I had to switch off the radio, at this line “A woman and her son wait for the bus.” It was such a let down. I expected a rising tempo, a heartfelt celebration. And got people waiting for the bus and kids taking out pencils.

I can still remember Clinton’s inauguration in 1993 with crystal clarity, down to what I was seeing out of the car windshield as a hurtled down Interstate 60 in Moreno Valley headed for who knows where. It was memorable not because of anything anyone said, and not because of Clinton, but because of Angelou’s “On the Pulse of the Morning” which was the most exciting part of the morning.